NAW Publications

The FPDA Motion & Control Network is a proud member of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW). NAW, through its NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence, publishes a wide variety of publications, all designed to aid the distribution management team. You may view the full array of titles and select the publications that meet your needs at www.naw.org. As a member of FPDA, you receive a discount on all purchases.

James J. Ambrose

This book offers a practical but powerful approach for taking your sales force to the next level. This book includes essential theories, key concepts, and real-world stories taken from the front lines of wholesale distribution. Best of all, it provides useful ideas that sales managers can apply today and be successful.

Mike Emerson, Steve Deist

Effective Sales Incentive Design for Distributors: What’s the Right Plan? is designed for top wholesale distribution executives and sales managers who are looking for the answer to this question: “How can I get my sales reps to just do what I want them to do?”

Jim Olsztynski

Essentials of Profitable Wholesale Distribution provides a straightforward and highly readable understanding of the wholesale distribution business that will make your team smarter -a lot smarter.

Twice the size of the first edition, this second edition includes both brand-new and updated instructional text and all-new graphics!

Making money in the wholesale distribution business gets tougher every year. When you add the current economic slump to the equation, making money can be downright grueling in some sectors of the market! More aggressive competition, expanded product lines, tighter profit margins, and more demanding customers require distributors to work longer, faster, and smarter to survive and remain profitable. Running a successful company requires cooperative efforts from knowledgeable and motivated employees. How can you ensure that your employees are aligned with your goals for high performance and profitability? You give them the Essentials!

Facing the Forces of Change®: Decisive Actions for an Uncertain Economy, by IBM’s Guy Blissett, provides wholesaler-distributors with strategic insights into the key business and economic trends affecting the wholesale distribution supply chain through 2015. The four major trend areas are:

Do you want to increase accountability, consistently accomplish our objectives, have more time to plan, and help your organization run more smoothly? If your answer is yes, you should read Kiss Theory Good Bye. It is the corporate execution play book, with step-by-step guidance and proven tools and tactics you can start using today to achieve extraordinary results.

A unique resource guide on pricing for distributors interested in driving higher margins. This book does a nice job of breaking the margin-management process down into manageable segments, and helps to shed light on the ‘dark science’ of margin management. It is a roadmap for any distributor looking to address profitability

Mike Marks and Mike Emerson, Indian River Consulting Group

Say the authors of this eye-opening book from NAW's Distribution Research and Education Foundation, there is absolutely no relationship between your sales incentive plan and your likely gain or loss in market share.

In fact, here's what matters most: setting an objective, getting management to use it in rating salesperson performance, and making sure your whole team buys in.

What's Your Plan? debunks the myths and shows you how to bring these three all-important factors into alignment. Get ready for a real "A-ha!" experience.

Mike Marks and Mike Emerson of Indian River Consulting Group surveyed hundreds of wholesale distribution executives and talked to dozens more in-depth on the phone. Their main finding is that pay plans don't - can't - operate effectively in a corporate/sales management vacuum. That may seem obvious, but the data here raise this question: If it's so obvious, why are so many wholesaler-distributors operating otherwise?

By reading this book and thinking deeply about the real-life compensation case studies presented, you can determine whether your firm has the preconditions in place to verify that your salesforce pay plan is the right one, or to adjust it as necessary so it produces the results you're seeking.

Mike Marks, Tim Horan, and Mike Emerson, Indian River Consulting Group

It takes a long time to develop good distributor-supplier relationships; unfortunately, it only takes a short time to destroy them.

Working at Cross-Purposes takes a look at what really drives distributor-supplier relationships, how often they go bad, and why. It can help senior distribution executives and their suppliers avoid the economic and other consequences of a core relationship turning sour by looking for a means of correcting emerging problems before they become critical. The authors explore the fallacy of “win-win” and provide readers with diagnostic tools to help distributors and their suppliers manage relationships in a way that proves beneficial to both parties.

Management - Human Resources

Sales Training

Jim Olsztynski

For many distributors, inside sales personnel are core components of their business, and more often than not, act as the customers’ first point of contact. Today, inside sales professionals are taking on greater responsibility for a company’s profitability and assuming many of the duties formerly performed by outside sales reps.

Essentials of Profitable Inside Sales in Distribution provides a real-world, in-depth understanding of the expanded role of inside sales. Increasingly today, inside sales staffs are responsible for generating sales and making sure those sales are profitable. This book is a perfect component in your company’s training program because it shows your inside sales staff exactly how they contribute to the health and well being of your company. They will learn how to make sales profitable, provide superb customer service, and develop their own expertise and image as a successful wholesale distribution professional at your company.

Scott Benfield - Available in PDF Format only

Marketing Plans for Growing Sales will help you take the shortest, most productive path to sales growth. By stripping away the jargon and confusion that surrounds most discussions of marketing, it will show you how to determine which customer segments offer the most opportunity and develop a workable strategy for penetrating those accounts. Also covered are important “non-planning factors”—issues involving services and products not directly involved in the marketing plan but which must be addressed to ensure success.

Attention Sales Executives: Place a copy of this book in the hands of every front-line salesperson on your staff!

Especially in this tough economic climate, wholesale distribution salespeople need a consistent sales model that provides them with the structure to effectively use their talents and skills for increased profitability. Objective-Based Selling™ in Wholesale Distribution provides exactly that sales model. With more than 100 open-ended questions ready to use, this book will teach your salespeople how to sell more at higher gross margins!

Tom Reilly

Value-Added Selling is a content-rich message of hope. It's both inspirational and informational. The value-added philosophy is a better view of business. Value-added salespeople are more focused on making a difference than just making a deal. Tom Reilly began his pioneering work in Value-Added Selling in 1985 when he wrote his first book on this topic. Since then, he has spread his message across continents to tens of thousands of salespeople and their managers. This new book combines the best of the old and proven with the new and innovative. In this book, Tom Reilly shares his insights and experiences of having worked with some of the best sales forces in the world over the past two decades. Reilly's creative and forward-thinking sales philosophy will shape the future for salespeople globally for decades to come.